This invention relates a transplanter system for receiving a plant and inserting it into the ground.
Crop establishment by means of transplants is widely used for numerous plants including vegetables, ornamental crops, tobacco, and, increasingly, sugar beets. Crop establishment by transplanting of plants has been used for many years because of many advantages that transplanting has over direct seeding.
Among the factors which have limited the use of transplants for crop establishment are the requirements for nurseries or greenhouses for seedling plant production, high labor requirements for rearing the seedling plants, and high labor requirements for transferring the plants to the fields.
With the advent of the use of growing trays in modular growing systems such as "Speedling", "Superspeedling", "Blackmore", and "Paper Pot", plant production of seedlings has been largely automated. Soil or growing media handling systems and planting operations are now becoming mechanized and specialized greenhouses make possible the production of seedlings without high labor requirements.
A continuing problem in crop establishment by transplanting is the high labor requirements in the field. There is an absence of acceptable mechanized transplanting machines for the popular seedling growth systems such as modular seedlings. (Modular seedlings are defined as plants growing in soil blocks or cells in contrast to bare root seedlings which have been removed from the soil and have no soil attached to the roots.)
Although numerous transplanting systems have been developed, most of them are unable to use a popular or widely accepted modular growing system. The transplanting systems or mechanisms have generally been slow with planting speeds of less than two kilometers per hour (1.5 miles per hour). Most of the transplanting systems are limited in use to a particular seedling production system.
Present wheel type transplanters deliver plants to the soil at zero relative velocity (which is desirable to avoid damage to the plant during the transplanting process), but have required the hand-feeding of plants because plant feeding mechanisms are inadequate to properly place plants onto the wheel mechanisms while the wheel mechanisms are operating at a high rate of speed. The desirable feature of placing the plants into the ground at zero relative velocity means that a wheel type of transplanter must have the wheel mechanism rotating sufficiently fast that its velocity at its outer rim is essentially equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to the speed of the vehicle upon which the transplanter system is mounted. However, the faster the vehicle goes (desirable for quickly transplanting a large number of plants), the harder it is to hand-feed plants (or to use mechanically feeding arrangements of any sort) to the quickly rotating wheel mechanism.